Is the EDA Industry Ready for Cloud Computing?

Let’s examine whether the EDA industry is ready for cloud computing and whether the cloud is ready for chip design and verification. 

Although cloud computing has existed for decades, many organizations are still not taking advantage of its business efficiencies, benefits, and competitive advantages. Instead, they rely on expensive, inflexible on-premises equipment and tools.

The security of IP and confidential data in the cloud has been a primary concern for chip makers. Many believed that IP and data were not safe in someone else’s infrastructure.

Yet, cloud service providers (CSPs) invest far more in security than any enterprise. And as threat landscapes evolve, organizations must continually respond.

CSPs now offer automated tools and state-of-the-art best practices, such as data encryption in transit and at rest. For major cloud providers, security has become a core competency integrated throughout their infrastructure to protect against threats. As a result, CSP security teams often are larger than most companies’ entire IT staff.

Because of the complexity of modern chip design and verification, chip makers have been compelled to use the cloud despite concerns. Chip design complexity has dramatically increased in response to the explosion of big data and market pressures from expanding applications—including:

• High-Performance Computing (HPC)
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Automotive
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• 5G Mobile Communications

Design complexity is exacerbated by high-performance, low-power, and area IPs used as building blocks for systems-on-a-chip (SoC).

Consequently, on-premises compute capacity has become an undeniable bottleneck for chip design teams to design and verify their IP designs and bring their SoC to market faster. These teams are being pushed to use cloud computing for the design and verification of modern SoCs.

Synopsys is committed to providing fast, secure, and efficient EDA cloud solutions to accelerate your cloud journey. Silicon chip design and verification are enhanced using our cloud-optimized flows. Synopsys also works closely with public cloud vendors such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services to optimize your experience. Since we assist cloud vendors in developing high-performance computing (HPC) SoCs, we understand what designers require in terms of EDA to produce chips for HPC workloads.

Cloud-based EDA solutions from Synopsys enable continual innovation, resulting in faster, less expensive, and better chips. Cloud EDA software gives you the productivity, scalability, security, and flexibility you need to design and verify chips in the cloud and migrate your software applications to the cloud. You can experience the benefits of cloud-based chip design with our cloud-ready design, verification, and IP solutions:

• Faster time to market. We have solutions that have been production tested on major public cloud platforms and are endorsed by large semiconductor foundries.
• Improved chip quality. Our cloud-based solutions offer massive elasticity and scalability.
• Cost-effective. Our solutions are designed to take advantage of cost-optimized spot instances in the cloud.

With Synopsys Cloud, you can access unlimited EDA software licenses on-demand and focus on what you do best—designing chips. We have reinvented the future of chip design with cloud-native EDA tools, pre-optimized hardware platforms, and a modern customer experience.

Synopsys Cloud offers:

• Unlimited EDA licenses. Select and use the tools and compute resources you need without being limited by traditional licenses.
• Pre-optimized compute flows. Accelerate time-to-results at any scale, wherever you are.
• Exponential compute power. Run design and verification jobs faster with limitless compute and flexible software-as-a-service (SaaS) and bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) deployment options.
• SaaS. Design and verify chips in the cloud without building infrastructure or managing license servers. We use a single contract that provides access to the required software, hardware, and expert support. SaaS includes the following EDA tools:
  • RTL and gate-level simulations
  • Static timing analysis
  • Physical verification
  • Robust cloud-optimized flows
• Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC). Take advantage of Synopsys Cloud’s unlimited access to EDA tools through a true pay-per-use pricing model by working directly with the major cloud providers. You can run the same flows with your existing scripts.

With Synopsys Cloud’s FlexEDA model, you can access our EDA applications on-demand and run unlimited parallel jobs and regressions using cloud pay-per-use technology. FlexEDA enables all resources to be accessible anytime, without arbitrary resource constraints.

The FlexEDA model is based on unlimited EDA license availability with true pay-per-use hourly or minute-by-minute. Designers plan, schedule, and run specific EDA jobs based on where they are in the design cycle and their power, performance, and area goals. The EDA software is scaled automatically according to the elastic cloud infrastructure enabled by the designer.

The FlexEDA model is leverages the following architectural elements:

• By using metering technology, on-demand EDA tools are now available without changing the EDA software code.
• EDA workloads are pre-optimized. We benchmarked and tested hundreds of compute virtual machines available in the public cloud for EDA workloads.
• We provide deep integration with cloud stacks so you can benefit from auto-scaling, fault-tolerance, and metering capabilities.
• We provide access to all EDA workloads through a browser and a platform with native scheduling, virtual desktops, and project and user management capabilities.
• The CSP’s shared responsibility model is elevated through in-depth security with a fully integrated architecture to ensure customer data and IP are protected at all levels.
• Customers who prefer to run and manage their public cloud environments can use FlexEDA in a BYOC deployment model.

We believe FlexEDA will shape the future of EDA because of its flexibility in pricing and licensing without predefined infrastructure constraints or license quantity commitments. Synopsys Cloud FlexEDA lets designers approach each project differently, so that chip design and verification tools can be used according to design needs.